The Oil Well Stream
There is an omnipresent need in the oil industry for rapid, high-volume liquid/liquid separation in which one of the liquid phases is conventional crude oil, or "syncrude" produced from tar sands, or shale oil, and the other is water, or brine. Oil and water are, of course, immiscible, however, an aqueous phase is frequently present in produced oil as a highly dispersed, discontinuous phase. The mixture is referred to as an emulsion. The source of this aqueous phase is formation water and/or condensed steam used in secondary and tertiary recovery.